The loading of hydrogen (or its isotopes) into a solid material is an important technology for hydrogen fuel cells and low energy nuclear reactors. A hydrogen loading ratio in palladium above 0.8 is widely believed to be a necessary condition to produce a LENR. High loading of hydrogen into a fuel cell compatible material increases the life of the fuel cell. The loading of methane into metal-organic frameworks is an important, emerging technology to increase the storage capacity of this fuel source. In each of these scenarios, the loading process must be controllable, quantifiable and sustainable to be repeatable and production-worthy.
Several techniques are known for measuring the amount of hydrogen that is loaded into a solid material. The amount of hydrogen loaded into a solid material can be quantified by measuring an increase in a sample's mass or a decrease in pressure of a fixed quantity of gas in the presence of the material.
Measuring the pressure decrease in a fixed quantity of gas suffers from one major source of error. The gas may adsorb on all surfaces present in addition to the material of interest. Also, the existing technologies do not allow for the hydrogen load to be sustained after quantification. For high purity, homogeneous materials this does not necessarily present a problem because sample of the same material may be used in other processes. In the case of multi-component materials such as layered thin films, nano-particles, or temperature sensitive alloys, sample-to-sample variability can be considerable creating a need to characterize materials for fuel cell or LENR use.